Sometimes the truth is not enough

I want computers (and web pages, and people, come to think of it) to be truthful.

That is, when I sign on to my credit card web page, I want it to give me an accurate and truthful list of transactions. I want to see the numbers for my account, not someone else's, and I want current information. And yes, I recognize that some information is not available in real time.

But in addition to truth, I want useful information. And sometimes the exact truth is not enough to be useful.

Case in point: a large bank's "find a branch" web page. I have accounts with said large bank (OK, the bank is Chase) and I can handle most transactions on-line. But not all transactions. For some, I need a branch office.

Now, I live outside of Chase's operating area. The history of my account explains this oddity. I opened the account with a bank called "Wingspan", which was Bank One's foray into online banking. After a few years, Bank One realized that online banking was banking and folded the operation into its regular operation. A few years later, Chase bought Bank One. Voila! I am a Chase customer.

So having a transaction that requires a visit to a branch, I decide to use Chase's web site to find a branch. I call up the page, type in my ZIP Code, and the result page says the following:

"There are no branches within thirty miles of you. If you change your criteria, you may get different results."

I will ignore the "change your criteria" statement, since all I can provide is a ZIP Code. Let's look at the first statement: "There are no branches within thirty miles of you." (The phrasing may be somewhat inexact, but that is the gist of the message.)

I'm sure that this is a true statement. I have no doubt that all of Chase's branche offices are further than thirty miles.

But the statement is not useful. It gives me no indication of where I can find a branch office, close to me or not. It leaves me to guess.

Now, I think I understand how this came to be. Chase designed the "find a branch" web page to report a subset of its branches, not the entire list. And that makes sense. I don't need to see the entire list, just the close ones. And Chase picked thirty miles as a cut-off for the meaning of "close". So a person in "Chase territory" gets a manageable list of perhaps a dozen branches. This behavior is useful.

But when the result list is empty, the behavior is not useful. It leaves me in the cold, with no "lead", nothing to follow, no clue about a branch location.

Truthful, but not useful.

Standards

Do we, in the programming profession, hold ourselves to high enough standards?

Here's what Christopher Alexander writes:

"In my life as an architect, I find that the single thing which inhibits young professionals,new students most severely, is their acceptance of standards that are too low. If I ask a student whether her design is as good as Chartres, she often smiles tolerantly at me as if to say, "Of course not, that isn't what I am trying to do... I could never do that."

Then, I express my disagreement, and tell her: "That standard must be our standard. If you are going to be a builder, no other standard is worthwhile. That is what I expect of myself in my own buildings, and it is what I expect of my students.""

-- from the foreword to Patterns of Software by Richard P. Gabriel --

I submit that we (in the programming community) have, for the most part, accepted standards that are too low. I submit that we have "sold out" to those who believe that "good enough" is good enough. We tolerate poor managers, poor developers, and poor techniques, and we congratulate ourselves on our mediocre efforts. We consider programming a job, an activity that occurs between the hours of 9:00 AM and 5:00 PM, with breaks for lunch and interruptions for meetings.

I submit that we have no standard to look to, no Chartres, in our profession. We build a thing and proclaim it to be wonderful, or at least what the user wanted (and with few major defects). We do not consider what could have been. We do not even consider what the "other guy" is building. We look at our own constructs (and not too closely, lest we see the warts) and think "that is a worthy accomplishment and therefore we are worthy".

Our efforts are expensive. Our processes are inefficient. Our participants are poorly educated, self-centered, and ignorant. Our results are unsatisfying. Users dislike, no, hate, that which we produce. We consider them beneath us and their opinions unimportant.

We think that we know what it is that we do, yet we do not know our profession's history.

One day we shall be weighed in the balance. On that day, I fear, we shall be found wanting.